It had to be 35 years ago because I have been running my company for 32 years and this event happened while I was on staff with a big company at a staff retreat.

We were being put up at a pretty swanky condo/hotel complex at Myrtle Beach. I went to the bar and there was a band playing there. Basically, two guys on stage. One playing the guitar, the other playing the bass and both singing. However, it was a full band sound.... strings, piano, drums, along with vocal harmonies, guitar switching tone from solo to rhythm, and even the lights were synced to the music.

My first thought was they were running tape.... So on the break, I spoke to the guitarist about the missing instruments and he explained that they were both studio musicians who put this "band" together to play the MB house gig. It wasn't tape. He showed me a computer... it was an old 286 dos machine.... state of the art at the time. Running Cakewalk sequencing and sending the midi to various midi modules for the other instruments. It also ran the guitar processor, the vocal harmonizer, and the lighting processor, all synced to the music. It took them a few days to a week per song to get the parts in and debugged. This was amazing technology for the time. Some time later, I met a local musician who was an early adopter of Cakewalk sequencing and I had a chance to spend more time with him asking questions about how it all worked. He's turned me on to some pretty cool stuff through the years.

Maybe this whole backing tracks thing explains a few of the concerts I went to sounding as good as they did considering what I was actually seeing on the stage. Heck... even Queen did this in the Bohemian Rapsody vocal layering part in the center of the song..... they'd dim the lights considerably and turn them back up after the vocal harmony part was done.... Even ZZ Top...I've seen them live 3x..... when there's 2 cats on stage with bass and guitar, and you hear a second guitar part and the sequencing that they have in some of their songs.......Can't say that I blame them though....

Personally, I don't care if you're using tracks.... as long as the whole show isn't a farce (Millie Vanillie for example)

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
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